In the earliest days of cinema, the role of the femme fatale took on a definite persona which encapsulated feminine sexual power and flaunted their dangerous perfection to the world. These icons changed the face of womankind forever.
The concept of the Vamp is as old as humanity itself. From the earliest myths and religious ideas shine examples of what may be considered the very archetype of the Vamp or femme fatale. In the earliest nature religions in which the deity uppermost in peoples' sacred thoughts was female we can discern her as the Wise Crone, the Devouring Mother, whose worship was often more frenzied and intrinsically linked to death than that of her other incarnations of Maiden and Mother. The Crone's worship usually involved darker secrets, arcane wisdom, and power attained by sacrifice of blood and sexuality. To some she is seen as the Bloodless Mother, the post-menopausal woman who must be fed by gore to maintain her innate power.
As matriarchal religions were trampled underfoot by the rising dominance of patriarchal and largely misogynistic faiths, the Crone figure became the despised witch, the hag, the demi-gorgon of popular fairy tales. Since her rites celebrated female wisdom, power and sexuality, she must to the mediaeval witch hunter's fanatical mind be in league with the Devil, since all things female were irretrievably evil and seditious to the common good.
The witch hunts still go on today, if in a gentler form encompassing disrespect of the elderly, irrational fear of the menopausal state, and blinkered intolerance of those who seek to reclaim their sexual and primal power through the many faces of the universal Goddess.
Today, by some curious reversal of Fate, the Vamp has become synonymous not with the hag and the witch but with the bewitching, sultry temptresses of youth. The Vamp now represents not the bloodthirsty Crone Goddess but the sex-hungry, man-eating young beauty who uses her sexual magnetism and female power to seduce and even to kill. She is the new Goddess: ruthless, powerful, demanding obedience not by fear or hatred but by love and desire. The femme fatale has changed her shape to suit the new age, clothing herself in the fabrics of elusive desirability, and working her charms on an entire world.
So how did this reversal come about? The simple answer is Hollywood. The advent of cinema has had the single most universal impact on social attitudes and has been used to address countless issues previously unspoken of or unconsidered by the majority of people in the world. Cinema is the floodgate that lets loose ideas and concepts on a viewing public of billions worldwide. Movie makers from the earliest days were quick to use this to engender and foster social lessons, parables for an increasingly decadent and immoral age. And it is from these earliest pictures that the true Vamp in all her perverse glory first appears.
From the late Victorian morality tales through the stories of a world at war, struggling through the Depression and out again into a dawn of new hope, the Vamp has screamed her presence as the ultimate hedonist: the voluptuous seducer of the innocent; the feisty demoiselle fighting for her legal rights in a world which refuses to recognise them; the sinful creature who throws the most lavish and intoxicating parties right through the Prohibition. In the early films she always eventually suffered for her pleasures these were still morality tales, after all but these days the siren, the seducer and the Vamp are more likely to win the empathy of the audience and to win over their would-be destroyers with unscrupulous logic and devastating sensuality. No longer will the sexual woman take the damning consequences of her so-called 'sins'.
One need only look at the role of women in vampire films to see this change of emphasis. At one extreme we see the vampish women of the Hammer films, who seem powerful enough in their own right until the obligatory Count enters the room, at which point they become subservient as the basest slaves, little better than Renfields with better cleavage and prettier faces. This of course is the true curse of Dracula, himself a product of a misogynistic, Victorian, patriarchal society. These days, female vampires are truly independent, powerful in their own right, and take no shit from anyone. Think of Anne Parillaud's Marie in 'Innocent Blood', Grace Jones' Katrina in 'Vamp', Eileen Daly's Lilith in 'Razor Blade Smile'. Even Kirsten Dunst's doomed Claudia in 'Interview with the Vampire' retains her autonomy fairly well, and can only really be held back by the fact of her childhood, not her lack of feminine power and even in an unsettling and perverse way her sexual power. She is as much a lover to Louis and Lestat as she is their daughter.
But to find the original Hollywood Vamps, one must look back to the early days before Vamps became vampires proper, as we understand the term today. These dangerous women may have lacked the fangs and fancy contact lenses, but they were devastating in their impact nevertheless. We're talking now about Theda Bara, Pola Negri, Marlene Dietrich, Talullah Bankhead, Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, amongst many others.
Theda Bara
Born Theodosia Goodman in either 1885 or 1890 (nobody is quite sure) in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bara can be cited quite categorically as the first of Hollywood's great Vamps. Manufactured utterly by the cinema publicity machine, and hyped by the media of her day, she courted scandal and controversy wherever she went. Her first starring role, in Frank Powell's 'A Fool There Was', based on Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name (itself based upon Philip Burne-Jones' painting 'The Vampire' unveiled in 1897), made her an overnight success.
Her stage name was later discovered coincidentally to be an anagram of 'Arab Death', a fact much exploited by the press of her day. The studio portrayed her as some kind of exotic Egyptian princess, swathed in Arabian mysticism and mystery, and Theda was only too happy to play along with it, appearing at press conferences in outrageous costumes and pretending to speak little English.
She went on to make an incredible 44 films in 11 years, most of them during the four years' duration of the First World War. She set fashions, scandalised the older generation, and worked tirelessly to promote the incipient womens' rights movement. She was constantly challenging the outmoded stereotypes of the female as accessory to the male, both on screen and off it.
Her character in 'A Fool There Was' was actually simply called 'The Vampire', a suitably mysterious moniker which shrouded her even further in mystery. She is a ruthless destroyer of men, but not in the ways of the conventional vampire as we understand it today. She is more of a psychic vampire, using not a supernatural lust for blood to kill her victims, but her female power and sexual persuasion to seduce and corrupt them into choosing the bad over the good. This is a highly charged morality tale in the Victorian mould, but Bara made the character of the evil influence something at once passionate and credible.
She quickly became associated with these kind of temptress roles, playing Cleopatra, Salomι, Carmen, Sappho, Madame du Barry and the daughter of the Devil in her brief yet extensive career. Her unique acting style melodramatic, predatory and profoundly sensual suited perfectly such roles, and such was her influence in them that she seemed somewhat less than believable on the rare occasions when she got the chance to play more traditional heroine roles, such as Juliet. The audiences cried out for her to return to vamping, and so she did, on numerous occasions.
Pola Negri
Born in Poland in 1894, this startlingly sultry actress also became a fashion setter in her own way, and played almost as many exotic characters as had Bara. Known to many in the business as 'The Tempestuous Slav' on account of her hedonistic ways and abrupt and violent temper, she came to represent the new form which the image of the Vamp took as the 1920s dawned. Whilst Bara had been predatory and wild, Negri's talents were less obvious and more ambiguous. She was more overtly sexual and vivacious than her predecessor, though this should be seen as much as a measure of her time than of her personality. As Pam Keesey in 'Vamp: an Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale' states, the 20s Vamp was 'masculine in her desires and demands, yet feminine in her means of fulfilling them'. She had also become slightly more sympathetic and less outright evil in her motives.
Negri's life was all the things which Bara's had been merely painted up as being: mysterious, exotic, romantic and laced with intrigue. When Negri arrived in Hollywood in 1922 from Poland, she brought her wild temper and thick accent with her to seduce the American masses with her Eastern European charms. She also carried the title of Countess, thanks to a short-lived marriage of some mystery. She was at one time engaged to Charlie Chaplin, was Rudolph Valentino's lover at the time of his early death, and eventually married a Prince. All this contrived to make her an enigma to Hollywood, and her lavish parties established her during the era of the Prohibition as a good time girl who knew how to really enjoy the hedonistic lifestyle of the rich and famous of her day. The Hollywood Film Pictorial of 5th November 1932 describes her thus: 'Pola set a new pace for Hollywood the moment she arrived. Then, as now, her mouth was vivid red; she had marble white cheeks, the whiteness accentuated by powder; luminous green eyes; dark black hair and eyebrows... When she was introduced to anyone, she would hold out the back of a slender white hand to be kissed.' As much a vampire as a Vamp then, perhaps?
She too played some interesting roles, including Madame du Barry, Carmen and Madame Bovary, and other highlights of her career include 'The Wildcat' (1921), 'The Cheat' (1923), and 'Flower of Night' (1925). In total she made 28 films.
Marlene Dietrich
Born in 1901 (a fact not ascertained for many years due to her elaborated air of mystery and agelessness), Dietrich is undoubtedly the most well-known of the quintessential Vamps. Stunningly beautiful, yet manufactured still by the director who took her under his wing and moulded her to his own particular desires, she was also highly talented as an actress and singer. During her long career she made an astonishing 58 films, covering a wider range of areas than her predecessors had achieved.
Early in her career she was considered for the role of Lulu in 'Pandora's Box' (a role which eventually went to another of our Vamps, Louise Brooks) but was discarded as being too aware of her own sensuality to convincingly play the part, which required a certain ingenuousness. She went on to grab the attention of director Josef von Sternberg, who set about transforming her into the icon we all admire today. He advised her on her fashion and make up, even going so far as to have all her molar teeth removed to generate her distinctive hollow cheek-boned look. Her first starring role, as Lola Lola in 'The Blue Angel' is a testament to Sternberg's ingenuity and Dietrich's immense talent, and is surely her finest moment as a Vamp, taunting and teasing her admirer into despair and desolation.
The pair made six more films together, but when the last of them failed to be a success, she moved on and came to work for some of the biggest directors in the business: David Hemmings, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder.
Talullah Bankhead
The legendary Talullah made her name on the British stage before returning a success to her native America to go into movies. Born in 1902 to a wealthy and powerful political Alabama family, she quickly turned her back on the social world of Washington for the diligent hard work of the stage, where she became the darling of London for many years. And as Screen Magazine gushed on her return to the States: 'You're going to like this poised, smartly-gowned blonde girl Talullah of the madonna brow, the great, cool eyes, the lovely, husky voice. She is different! She glitters!'
She was certainly different, and used her unusual beauty and remarkable voice to establish herself as a serious actress who wasn't afraid of working hard for a role. Her long career included working with Alfred Hitchcock on 'Lifeboat' and Hammer Studios in 'Die, die my darling' a few short years before her death in 1968.
Her greatest asset was always her sometimes shocking personality: she once turned cartwheels in the Ritz, revealing her lack of underwear, drank to excess and regularly indulged in cocaine and prescription drugs. She once told a newspaper reporter: "Dahling, cocaine is not habit forming, and I should know. I've been using it for years!" She often hosted her parties wearing nothing but high heels and make up, and her parties often lasted for days at a time. She even became the centre of one of the earliest known cases of 'groupie-dom', being followed by a screaming crowd of female fans calling themselves 'The Gallery Girls'. Her one great love was a rich aristocratic bisexual, Lord Arlington, who later married into the nobility, breaking Talullah's heart.
She was often touted as a highbrow mix of Garbo and Dietrich, and always showed good humour to the press. She was powerfully ambitious where her career was concerned, despite her love of a good time, and was bitterly disappointed to lose the part of Scarlett O'Hara in 'Gone with the Wind' to her friend Vivien Leigh.
There is enough material concerning Talullah's legendary life to justify a future article in Bloodstone, so keep those eyes peeled.
Greta Garbo
Now here was a true enigma, as exotic as Pola Negri and as talented as Marlene Dietrich. Born in Sweden in 1905 to a poor labouring family, she was spotted by director Mauritz Stiller, who became her mentor and took her to Hollywood. She was one of the last of the great silent movie stars who made the transition to the talkies 'Garbo speaks!' ran the newssheets to great public excitement and had a quality which was utterly removed from any of her contemporaries.
She represented a subtler, more sophisticated femme fatale, one who always seemed slightly at odds with the character of her temptresses. Indeed, she brought a unique charm to such roles, suggesting at one moment a worldly-wise woman who knew that love was a mere illusion, and the next a young innocent girl's reckless pursuit of love at all costs. Cynical yet inviolable, distant yet distinctly human all of that was Garbo.
She made 30 films, the most powerful of which must surely be 'Anna Christie', 'Anna Karenina' and the ultra vampish 'Mata Hari'. When she did play the femme fatale a role into which she was fortunately never typecast she did so in a manner which suggested a fatalistic obsession rather than an entirely evil motivation. Her enthusiastic intensity, the rapturous mobility of her expression and her sublime voice all combined to make her matchless in her perfection. Less the Vamp than Bara or Negri, but quite the most emotive all-round actress of our chosen Vamps.
She can be clearly seen as the model for many later Vamps and vampires, such as the incomparable Catherine Deneuve ('The Hunger') and the exquisite Delphine Seyrig ('Daughters of Darkness').
Louise Brooks
Born in Kansas in 1906, Brooks became the darling of the London stage before returning to Hollywood to define the era and style of the flapper with her dramatic hair and startlingly innocent beauty. There was always a certain raw, instinctive quality about her as an actress, and she loathed the politics of the Hollywood studios. It was this untapped sensuality which gained her her most iconic role as Lulu in G W Pabst's 'Pandora's Box' (1928), a role for which the young Marlene Dietrich had earlier been considered.
This now classic tale was not a great success of its day, but as is the nature of these things is now regarded as one of the seminal works of the silent era. Lulu, fallen from grace after being seduced by her doctor, is forced into a loveless marriage which ends in the accidental death of her husband. She is imprisoned for murder, but manages to escape thanks to the ingenuity of a lesbian Countess who falls in love with her. The story progresses as she meets a succession of men who fail her until she ends up in the utmost destitution, only to meet her Fate at the hands of a kindly gentleman caller who turns out to be none other than Jack the Ripper!
Lulu represents another transition of the Vamp into a rather more ingenuous character; not wilfully malicious but capable by her overwhelming beauty and naivety to inspire the worst character traits in those around her. She suffers not through her own evil, but because her innocence has a self-destructive quality to it. She is a tragic victim of the circumstances which surround her, and pays the ultimate price for her trust in others. The film was heavily censored at the time of its original release, largely due to the lesbian content which was considered too shocking for contemporary audiences.
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